Page 13 of I Have Faults Enough

"That's rather the trouble, isn't it," said the man nearest her, not unkindly, dragging her back toward the gate and the waiting cart. "Everyone knowing. Should've thought of that before you came walking where you weren't wanted."

She saw Darcy wrenched upright between his two captors, and saw him twist half free for one instant and take a blow across the face; it snapped his head sideways and left him swaying. She then saw him found again by rough hands and hauled, half stumbling, toward the same cart she was being dragged to.

Their eyes met once, across the churned dark earth of the kitchen garden; his, above the blood at his mouth, holding hers intensely, his eyes held only a fierce, before a sack, rough and reeking of grain, came down over his head from behind him, and then soon after hers. And, the last thing she heard clearly, before the world narrowed to darkness and the jolt of being lifted bodily off her feet, was Darcy's voice, raw and furious, shouting her name.

Inside Netherfield, at that same moment, the evening was proceeding with a great deal of noise signifying very little, and no one troubled themselves to remark that either of the two people presently being dragged toward a waiting cart was not, at that precise instant, in the room.

The trouble in the kitchen had begun some twenty minutes before, when a scullery maid, hurrying with more haste than care to clear the fish course, had caught her apron against an unattended lamp and sent it toppling into a basket of linen set too near the hearth for anyone's later comfort.

The flame had caught quickly, and been smothered quickly besides, the cook having had the presence of mind to douse the whole business with a jug of standing water before it could progress beyond a great deal of smoke and a ruined tablecloth; but the smoke itself had found its way up the back stair and into the passage behind the drawing-room, and it was this, rather more than the fire, that had drawn Caroline Bingley from her guests at the precise moment her absence would prove most costly.

She had gone below in a state of considerable irritation, more concerned for what a whiff of scorched linen might suggest to her assembled company about the general competence of her household than for any real danger the fire had posed, and had spent a full quarter hour, by the time all was accounted for, alternately scolding the unfortunate maid and instructing the housekeeper on how the whole unfortunate business was to be kept from reaching the ears of anyone upstairs, lest it become, by morning, another piece of gossip for Meryton to enjoy at Netherfield's expense.

Mrs. Hurst had gone down after her, drawn by much the same anxiety, and between the two of them and the housekeeper and the cook and the still-trembling maid, the kitchen passage had absorbed a very great deal of the household's attention for a stretch of time.

Above stairs, the drawing-room noticed none of it. Sir William, planted near the fire with a glass he had refilled rather more often than not, was engaged in a lengthy and largely uninterrupted account of his presentation at St. James's some years before, a story his present audience, Mrs. Philips, and Mary, who had had heard often enough to anticipate its every turn, and bore with a glazed patience.

Mrs. Bennet held forth at the card table with a triumph that suggested she had finally earned a good hand, and Kitty at her elbow offering opinions on the play that nobody had solicited and everybody good-naturedly ignored. Jane and Bingley sat somewhat apart, near enough to the general company to satisfy every requirement of propriety and far enough from it, in the particular manner of two people newly and happily attached, to have noticed very little beyond each other for the better part of the last half hour.

It was Jane, in fact, who first thought to wonder where her sister had got to, though even this thought arrived without alarm, some considerable time after Elizabeth had gone out onto the terrace and rather longer still after she had gone beyond it.

"I have not seen Lizzy this quarter hour," she said to Bingley, glancing about the room. "Nor Mr. Darcy, now I think of it."

"Gone for air, I expect," Bingley said, comfortably, "or fallen into some argument in a corner, which I collect is rather their habit of an evening these last weeks." He said it with fond amusement, and Jane, finding nothing in his easy answer to contradict her own inclination toward the same comfortable reading, let the matter rest, and returned her attention to whatever pleasant nothing he had been saying to her before the thought had occurred to her at all.

It was another quarter hour before the thought recurred, and was prompted by nothing more than the ordinary business of the tea tray being brought round and the natural inclination of a hostess's absence to be remarked upon once refreshment required someone to pour it.

Caroline, returned at last from below with her composure carefully restored and no visible trace of the crisis she had just concluded managing, took up the duty herself, and it was in the course of counting heads to determine how many cups the tray would want that she found, with mild and not yet alarmed surprise, that her brother's particular friend was nowhere present among them.

"Has anyone seen Mr. Darcy?" she asked, to the room in general, and was met with the kind of vague, unhelpful murmur such questions generally produce when no one has, in fact, been paying the smallest attention to the matter.

"Nor Lizzy," Jane said again, and this time something in her own voice carried enough of a question that Bingley, catching it, looked properly around the room himself for the first time that evening with anything like real attention.

"They cannot have gone far," he said, though he rose as he said it. "Darcy does not care for close rooms. He has very likely stepped out onto the terrace, and Miss Elizabeth with him, arguing about something or other as they generally do."

He went to look, expecting to find exactly what he had described, two figures on the dark terrace, deep in one of their habitual disputes, easily fetched back in for tea with nothing more serious to answer for than having missed the tray's arrival, and it was the particular quality of his silence, returning some minutes later, considerably less easy than he had gone out, that first told the room something had gone properly wrong.

"The terrace is empty," he said. "I called. I do not think either of them can be very near, for I should have heard an answer by now, if there were one to be had."

It was not yet fear, in that first moment, only a small, spreading unease, but it was enough to draw Mrs. Bennet's attention at last from her cards, and Mr. Bennet's from whatever quiet corner he had retreated to for the evening's duration, and within a few minutes more the whole drawing-room had abandoned its separate small businesses entirely, gathered instead around the single, unwelcome question of where two people could have got to, on a cold winter night, in the better part of an hour, without a single soul among a houseful of guests having troubled to notice the going.

It would be the better part of another hour still, candles fetched, the gardens searched by lamplight, the stillroom door found forced and the sack of stolen plates abandoned beside it before anyone properly understood that something was dreadfully wrong.

CHAPTER 9

The cart did not travel far before it stopped, perhaps twenty minutes, perhaps less, Elizabeth thought, although she had no clear means of judging beneath the sacking, the jolting dark, and her erratic nerves.

When the sack was at last pulled from her head, she found that she was not in any open country she might have used to orient herself, but inside a building. It had a low, close space that smelt of old hay and damp stone. It was lit by a single lantern turned down to little more than a coal. It was cold enough that her breath showed in it.

A disused barn, she judged, or some outbuilding long fallen from any farm's regular use. The walls hung with the ghost-shapes of harness and tools nobody had troubled to remove when whatever use the place once served was abandoned.

Darcy was some feet from her; his hands bound before him with some sort of rope that had been improvised into fist cuffs. She could barely see his swollen lip and a dark mark rising along one of his cheekbones. The moment his eyes found hers, she quickly understood, from the look alone, that he was worried for her; she gave him a brief, small nod, and turned her head, but feeling an acute fear that the guards would notice them communicating in silence, she turned her head from him.

They were still in the cart, and seated, as she looked carefully around the room. Elizabeth noticed there were four of them. She had time, now, to look properly, and did.

The one who had spoken first in the garden was a lean, sharp-faced man, perhaps forty. He stood nearest the lantern, and it was to him the others looked. The others called him Cobb. A second man, heavier, with a broken-veined face that suggested a fondness for drink he had not lately been able to indulge, paced near the door with restless energy.

A third, younger than the rest, could not have been above eighteen, and stood apart with his hands shoved into his coat and his eyes moving constantly between his companions and the two captives, while the fourth remained outside with the horses, his voice occasionally audible through the door. It sounded low and urgent, but Elizabeth could not make out the words.